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Trump did it before. He’d do it again.

Published by Tom Sullivan on October 1, 2023

The press ignores the “Banality of Crazy”

Cesar Sayoc Pleads Guilty to 65 Felonies for Mailing 16 Improvised Explosive Devices in Connection with October 2018 Domestic Terrorist Attack. The Trump supporter was only 26 short of the felonies for which Trump faces trials.

“Sometimes, you have to write when you’re angry,” Brian Klaas begins. Works for me.

Klaas also hates writing about Donald Trump. The orange train wreck gets too much free press as is. But sometimes you just gotta. The banality of evil in the Trump age has become the banality of crazy.

A Democratic congressman (Jamal Bowman) does something stupid in a rush to get from the Cannon Office Building to a snap vote in the House chambers and … what you’d expect to happen happens:

Meanwhile, the leading Republican candidate for the presidency in 2024 is a man was “found liable for rape, who incited a deadly, violent insurrection aimed at overturning a democratic election, who has committed mass fraud for personal enrichment, who is facing 91 separate counts of felony criminal charges against him, and who has overtly discussed his authoritarian strategies for governing if he returns to power.”

On top of that, the accused felon appears to be losing marbles he can’t afford to lose. Klaas is upset that the press still dances around saying so while issuing endless takes about why the incumbent president just three years older should drop out for being too old.

I posted on how insane the situation is on Saturday. Klaas covers much of the same Trump babbling, threats, and cruelty.

“The United States is not just careening toward a significant risk of political violence around the 2024 presidential election. It’s also mostly oblivious to where it’s headed,” he wrote in The Atlantic.

At The Garden of Forking Paths, Klaas asks:

What is going on? How is it possible that the leading candidate to become president of the United States can float the prospect of executing a general and the media response is…crickets?

How is it possible that it’s not front page news when a man who soon may return to power calls for law enforcement to kill people for minor crimes? And why do so few people question Trump’s mental acuity rather than Biden’s, when Trump proposes delusional, unhinged plans for forest management and warns his supporters that Biden is going to lead us into World War II (which would require a time machine), or wrongly claims that he defeated Barack Obama in 2016.

On the political left, there has long been a steady drumbeat of admonishment on social media for those who highlight Trump’s awful rhetoric. Whenever I tweet about Trump’s dangerous language, there’s always the predictable refrain from someone who replies: “Don’t amplify him! You’re just spreading his message.”

The press, to an astonishing extent, has followed that admonishment. I looked at the New York Times for mention of Trump calling to execute shoplifters, or water the forests, or how he thinks an 82 year-old man getting his skull smashed in his own home by a lunatic with a hammer is hilarious. Nothing. I couldn’t find it.

The “Don’t Amplify Him” argument is not working. Trump will continue to radicalize supporters as he campaigns. How many more Cesar A. Sayocs are out there building pipe bombs or planning worse?

Those of us who follow politics closely know how nuts this situation is. But how many Americans who show up to vote for president once every four years do, Klaas asks. How many know Trump called for the execution of a four-star general? “Five percent? Less?”

The “Banality of Crazy”

There’s a puzzle at the heart of Trump news and it’s this: why doesn’t the press go FULL BLOCK CAPITALS when a leading presidential candidate, yet again, incites violence?

If Joe Biden called to execute shoplifters, do you think there’d be a big headline in the New York Times, or do you think you’d have to scroll well past the articles on pumpkin spice lattes and DogTV to find out about it?

We all know the answer.

When Joe Biden didn’t trip but nearly tripped last week, it was headline news. How absurd is that? A candidate who didn’t quite fall over is a bigger news story than a candidate calling to execute shoplifters? (For the record, roughly ten percent of the US population shoplifts, so millions would face potential execution under Trump’s proposal).

This is what I call the Banality of Crazy—and it’s warping the way that Americans think about politics in the Trump and post-Trump era.

“American journalists have become golden retrievers watching a tennis-ball launcher. Every time they start to chase one ball, a fresh one immediately explodes into view, prompting a new chase,” Klaas wrote in The Atlantic.

By breathlessly covering every minor gaffe by Joe Biden while ignoring unhinged incitements to violence by Trump, most voters never see the sides of Trump that should most worry them. This creates plausible deniability for voters, where they can say “He doesn’t seem too bad — both candidates are flawed, but I’m going with Trump.”

My view is this: if someone wants to vote for a cruel sociopathic authoritarian, they should do so without being able to pretend they don’t know what they’re supporting. There should be a social stigma for voting for Trump, because what he stands for is so far outside the bounds of acceptable democratic politics anywhere else in the world. But that can’t work unless everyone is aware of Trump’s increasingly violent, deranged insanity.

Instead, the press has succumbed to the numbing effect of the Banality of Crazy, once reporting on every single Trump tweet in early 2017 because it was unusual, but now ignoring even the most dangerous policy proposals by an authoritarian who is on the cusp of once again becoming the most powerful man in the world—precisely because it happens, like clockwork, almost every day.

Klaas provides a taxonomy of voters who support Trump with “decreasing levels of devotion,” basically:

  • The MAGA Mob
  • Vote Red Until I’m Dead
  • Anti-Bidens
  • Fence Sitters

This four-part breakdown also helps us understand why the Don’t Amplify Him or the Banality of Crazy approaches haven’t worked. Much of what Trump says and does is objectionable to the vast majority of Americans who are decent, compassionate people. But right now, it’s the MAGA Mob and the Vote Red Until I’m Dead folks who are getting a constant saline drip of Trumpism into their veins. It’s not changing their minds; it’s just solidifying their devotion.

Meanwhile, the persuadable voters are being given the chance to forget the horrible stuff Trump did that they once knew about, all while reading blaring headlines about how Biden is old. (Biden is three years older than Trump — but, and I can’t believe I need to say this, elevated age is not remotely the same as being an authoritarian fraudster, found liable for rape, who stole the government’s nuclear secrets and sought to overturn an election to stay in power by inciting a violent attack on the US Capitol).

The Trump trials may help erode his support, but their non-crazy structure and Trump avoiding tesifying may not highlight how insane this situation is. Or else his acceding to trial in a Fulton County courtroom is because he thinks he can manipulate live TV coverage to titilate and further enrage a follower or three to perpetrate violence in his name. We know that was his plan on Jan. 6. He’d do it again.

Klaas insists:

The press has an obligation to convey magnitude, not just novelty. Newspapers and TV channels have limited time and space to discuss political events. In a political world in which an authoritarian contender for the presidency is floating the idea of shoplifting executions and killing generals, maybe, just maybe it’s not worth the space or time to discuss a brief stumble or a dog bite?

Don’t hold your breath.

Update: Making Klaas’s point (and mine) about the press failing to expose voters to “the sides of Trump that should most worry them.” Behold this pair who don’t know who their governor is/was.

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